


What Every Little Kid Wants

by isabeau25



Series: Paladins and their Pets [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Tooth Rotting Fluff, and nothing else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-01
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-27 16:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10032326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isabeau25/pseuds/isabeau25
Summary: It's Shiro's birthday, and the team has a surprise for him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For day three of [Platonic Voltron Week](http://platonicvldweek.tumblr.com/). Technically the prompt was lion/bond, but they also said we could do Shiro's birthday, so that's what I ended up doing.

“You have to close your eyes,” Keith gave Shiro a stubborn look.

“Why?” Shiro narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

“I can’t tell you,” Keith huffed.

Shiro raised an eyebrow at him.

“Come on Shiro,” Keith prodded, “we worked really hard on this.”

“We?” Shiro’s suspicion deepened.

“Everyone,” Keith clarified, “stop being such a baby.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Shiro rolled his eyes, then closed them.

“Don’t look,” Keith took his hand, tugging him down the hall.

Shiro couldn’t be sure, but he thought they were heading in the direction of the commons room. If the sound of laughter and loud voices was any indication, the team was indeed gathered together, along with Allura and Coran.

It sounded like a party, and it had been a few months since they had last had one, so Shiro supposed they were about due. They didn’t really track earth dates too closely, because it had proved to be too much of a double edged sword for them. To constantly be reminded of everything they were missing at home just hurt too much.

They held onto a general sense of how much time had passed on earth, and sometimes someone on the team would randomly announce that they absolutely had to have a party for some obscure holiday that none of them had ever celebrated before.

The last party they had had hadn’t been for a holiday at all. Lance had cornered him after training to tell him Hunk had been working really hard lately and was really homesick, so they needed to have a party for him. Shiro really couldn’t find a reason to say no to that. Well, he could have, but what sort of heartless person said no to cheering Hunk up.

That had been a while ago though, so Shiro supposed it was about time for another one. Hopefully, this one wasn’t because the team thought he needed cheering up. Shiro started sifting through his behavior the last few weeks, trying to figure out if he had done anything that would have made the team worry. He really couldn’t come up with anything that was out of the ordinary, which wasn’t to say there weren’t things he did ordinarily that made the team worry. He didn’t really have much control over that.

“Stand here,” Keith stopped moving, pulling Shiro to a halt, “but don’t open your eyes yet.”

The giggles and whispered continued, the team obviously not trying to be stealthy. Surprise parties were really not Shiro’s thing, and the team knew that.

“Okay, now you can open them,” Lance said, and Shiro realized Keith wasn’t standing next to him anymore.

Shiro opened his eyes and stared blankly at the huge banner strung across the room. ‘Happy Birthday Shiro!’ was written in large, colorful letters.

“Happy Birthday Shiro!” the shout was accompanied by noise makers and clackers, and followed by awful off-key singing.

Shiro laughed and grinned brightly at the team. It had been a long time since he had had a birthday party.

“Is it really my birthday?” he asked once the shouting had singing had stopped.

“Well, technically, you don’t have a birthday this year,” Pidge smirked at him, “but we figured it was close enough.”

“Thank you,” Shiro said sincerely, “this is really great.”

“You haven’t even gotten your presents yet,” Lance grinned at him.

“You guys really didn’t need to get me presents,” Shiro protested.

“We needed to get you this one,” Lance’s grin got bigger, and he nudged Keith with his elbow.

Shiro raised an eyebrow at him, suddenly wondering if he should be concerned.

“Shut your eyes again,” Hunk demanded cheerfully.

Shiro sighed, but obeyed. Whatever it was, Allura and Coran were in on it, so it couldn’t have been that bad. He heard someone leave the room, and it only took a minute or two for them to return and come stand in front of him. He almost opened his eyes when he heard something that sounded like panting, but he forced himself to keep them shut, not wanting to ruin their fun.

“You can open them,” Keith said from right in front of him.

Shiro opened them, then had to blink to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.

There was what appeared to be a puppy in Keith’s arms, wagging its tail happily and wigging in Keith’s grip.

“Happy birthday,” Keith beamed at him.

“It’s a puppy,” Shiro reached out for it eagerly.

“A space puppy,” Lance came to lean cheerfully on Keith’s shoulder as the puppy was transferred over to Shiro’s arms, “it was Keith’s idea, but we all helped.”

The puppy wiggled and whined happily in Shiro’s arms, sniffing at his face, and then proceeding to cover it in licks. Shiro grinned and buried his face in the soft fur. It was curly and a rich, warm black, with the occasional teal highlight.

“Technically, they’re called abjaxians,” Hunk supplied, “but everything we’ve read on them makes them seem a lot like dogs. Slightly different diet, and some different behaviors, but really close.”

“Keith picked her out,” Lance grinned, “and we helped him hide her until your birthday.”

“We also helped him figure out if we would be able to feed her,” Pidge put in, “and made sure she wasn’t going to grow up to be a monster, or develop weird alien super powers and take control of our minds in our sleep.”

Keith rolled his eyes.

“Well, really, he was going to get her for you anyway as soon as he saw her,” Hunk added, “we just sort of helped make sure it would work out the way he thought it would when we found out.”

“Coran helped us hide her once we brought her on board,” Lance motioned in the direction of the Alteans, “and Allura didn’t kill us when she found out.”

Allura snorted softly and shook her head. This was hardly the strangest or most disruptive thing her paladins had tried to do under her nose.

“She’s been on the ship a little over a week now,” Allura smiled, “our paladins have been doing an excellent job caring for her and beginning her training.”

“Do you like her?” Keith asked, sounding almost shy.

Shiro actually hadn’t been listening to much of what they were saying, his attention absorbed by the warm, vibrating bundle of joy in his arms. She even smelt good, like the herbal shampoo Lance and Pidge liked to use.

At Keith’s question though, he lifted his face from her fur. Trying to take care of a dog, even a space dog, on a spaceship, in the middle of a war, with all the unpredictabilities and time restraints that that entailed, seemed inadvisable, at the least, and certainly impractical.

And Shiro didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.

“She’s perfect,” he beamed, “thank you!”

Keith smiled widely, looking nearly as happy as the puppy.

“I told you he’d like her,” Lance rumpled Keith’s hair, “what little kid doesn’t want a puppy.”

“Stop that right now,” Shiro poked at Lance’s nose, “or I’m not sharing my cake.”

The team laughed, and Shiro gave as many of them one armed hugs as he could manage, the other arm occupied with holding the puppy to his chest. Eventually, he made it to the couch and flopped down, finally releasing the puppy to wander around the room and play. She immediately started trying to chase the floating platters. They were too high for her to reach, but that didn’t dim her enthusiasm.

“You have to name her,” Keith sat next to him, snagging two purple cupcakes off a platter and offering him one.

“We’ve been calling her ‘extra laps,’” Pidge tucked herself against Shiro’s side, snagging her own cupcake.

“Why?” Shiro laughed, reaching down to scratch the puppy’s ears when she ran back to him, tail wagging so hard it shook her body.

“It was a code name,” Lance pulled a ball out of his pocket, squeezing it.

It squeaked, and the puppy barks and jumped excitedly.

“She’s good at chasing it, but we’re still working on her actually bringing it back,” Lance held the ball out to Shiro, “the code name was Hunk’s idea.”

“Okay, but why?” Shiro threw the ball, and the puppy raced after it, tripping over herself in her excitement.

“Because then we could say things like ‘I’m going to go run extra laps’ and we all knew that meant we were going to take care of the puppy, but you thought we were just being extra dedicated,” Hunk explained.

Shiro snorted, holding his cupcake out of the puppy’s reach when she returned without the ball and seemed to think the purple frosting looked similar enough to be a new toy.

“Well, that should have tipped me off right there,” he passed his cupcake to Pidge, not caring if she ate it as long as it freed up his hands to hold his puppy again.

“Are you implying we’re lazy?” Pidge smirked at him, licking the frosting off of her newly acquired cupcake.

“No, never,” Shiro buried his face back in the puppy’s fur.

“She does need a real name though,” Hunk reached down to scratch the puppy’s ears.

“Well,” Shiro straightened, arms still wrapped loosely around his new companion, “she looks like a Grace to me.”

The puppy barked, clearly in total agreement.


End file.
